


Old Things Turned New Again

by langsdelijn



Series: Nostalgia [1]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Brocedes, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:31:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/langsdelijn/pseuds/langsdelijn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's something they used to do, when one of them needed it for any reason, sleep in one room and keep each other company, but that stopped in early 2014. And, yet, there Lewis is at Nico's door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Things Turned New Again

Lewis is at least polite enough to ask via text before showing up at the door. ‘I don’t want to be alone tonight,’ is all he has to say for himself, when Nico lets him in, and he turns out to be predictably unwilling to explain how or why.

‘Yeah, alright,’ says Nico, who knows better than to have hope for further elaboration. ‘You can—’ he makes a grand gesture into the room to indicate Lewis can make himself at home and so on. They do this, sometimes, sleep together in one of their rooms and share a bed, and more often than not the reasons why remain unshared.

It’s not happened for a long time now, of course, not since the beginning of last year when all the things between them unravelled both on the track and off it. He used to try not to think of how much he missed it, knowing how unlikely it was for this ever to happen again, at least while the world championship battle had only the two of them as contenders and maybe even beyond that. 

He tries not to think of what brought Lewis back to his door now. Because what with how reluctant Lewis has been to even be in Nico’s presence unnecessarily lately and how uncomfortable he has been in it, it’s got to be something more complicated than plain loneliness.

‘Yeah, man, thanks,’ Lewis says absently, as he drifts aimlessly past him into the room proper. 

Nico closes the door and sighs. Maybe he should have said no. With the way things have been going between them, this could be a terrible mistake. There are still times when something that should have been innocuous will set them off at each other regardless.

‘Hey, Nico?’ Lewis calls, and he does sound more upbeat now than before, but Nico can tell that the liveliness is forced, ‘I want to take a shower while the water’s still hot, so,’ he continues, but if he’s said anything else, Nico will never know because that’s when he closes the bathroom door and Nico can’t hear him anymore. It’s actually Lewis who used to use up all the hot water, and no matter how much he tries to shift the blame, this is not something Nico will ever forget, or fail to remind Lewis of, by the way. And anyway, a limited amount of hot water is no longer a concern. Although, for the record, Lewis’ showers have not been greatly reduced in length by adulthood.

‘Oh, fuck you,’ Nico mutters, still in English even though there’s no way Lewis can hear, and with a fond exasperation that he’s not felt in ages. He never would have refused Lewis this. He couldn’t, not when it would have caused him to miss out on it himself. If it is a mistake, he hopes it’ll have been worth it, having this back even for a moment.

 

‘I hope you left me some of that hot water,’ Nico warns when Lewis finally emerges from the bathroom freshly showered and clad in a pair of pants and nothing else, though there’s a shirt in his right hand that has good odds of having been recently liberated from Nico’s possession. Nico tries not to stare, but to be honest, that keeps getting more difficult the more highly noticeable tattoos keep appearing on the canvas of Lewis’ body.

Lewis tries to look shocked and fails, but at least his playfulness this time feels more genuine than before. ‘Oh, Nico,’ he despairs unconvincingly, proving once more that he’s a bad actor in roles small, large, and irrelevant, ‘do your employers not pay you enough to afford sufficient hot water? I didn’t know, man, you—’

Nico cuts him off before he can go on, and on, about the damn water and his own non-existent privation of the privileges befitting of his station in the realm of the aforementioned. ‘Own your long showers, man,’ he says, in his best impression of therapeutic helpfulness. Nico knows he’s not a particularly good actor himself, but he’s at least a better one than Lewis, so he even gets the thoughtful little headshake right.

Lewis snorts, but Nico stands up and gives Lewis a mock-supportive touch on the shoulder, the-first-step-is-admitting-you-have-a-problem style, in passing as he heads into the bathroom himself to enjoy his own damn shower in his own damn time (especially with how long he’s had to wait for it) before he can come up with a retort. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he lies, when Lewis tells him to fuck off and keep his stupid hands to himself through the door.

‘Yes, you can,’ Lewis whines, but Nico ignores that, too. 

Lewis’ clothes, shirt included, are bunched up in the corner behind the door, because of course they are. Nico kicks at the bundle, which fails to elicit a reaction for obvious reasons, but otherwise leaves it alone, and strips out of his own clothes, which he pointedly hangs over a towel rail to show the bathroom how it’s done.

He’s half-tempted to try to run out the hot water just for fun to see if he can, but that would be wasteful and environment-unfriendly, irony appreciated, not to mention immature, so all he does is take his time to enjoy the water within reason and then some, and then turns off the shower. He reaches for a towel and dries himself off methodically, then wraps the towel around his waist. 

Lewis had better not have used his toothbrush, Nico thinks, eying it suspiciously. He carries a spare, but he’s not so paranoid about shared toothbrush usage that he’ll let himself be exiled to it. He lays it out for Lewis to use instead, still nice and neat in its package, and as annoying to break out as always. He brushes his teeth and examines himself in the mirror while he does do, runs his free hand through his hair and finds it still a bit too damp for comfort. He towels it again with the last unused one later.

All that done, he grabs his clothes and steps back into the bedroom.

‘Well, well, well,’ Lewis calls from the bed when Nico steps into a fresh pair of boxers, but his heart clearly isn’t in it and he isn’t even really looking, so there’s no need to dignify it with a response. He seems to have opted to further clothe himself after all, in what is probably the shirt from earlier and a pair of equally-borrowed sweatpants.

Nico declines to ask. He knows he wouldn’t get an answer anyway.

 

He wakes up, and he’s fairly certain that that’s because Lewis has been awake and watching him for some time, and it was the sheer amount of attention that roused him. He doesn’t need to look at a clock to know it’s still the middle of night. Nico turns onto his side to face Lewis, and tries to make out more than the contour of him, since the only lighting in the room is from the gloomy indicators of various electronics. He wonders if maybe Lewis hadn’t been looking at him after all, just staring in his general direction in the dark. ‘Hey,’ he says, which comes out a lot huskier than he intended from sleep.

‘I’m fine, Nico,’ Lewis says, after a moment. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll be fine.’

So, which is it? Nico wonders but doesn’t ask. Are you alright or will you be? He also doesn’t ask if Lewis wants to talk about it, because he would if he did. ‘I think I can help you sleep,’ he says, and shifts so he can press his mouth to the bare skin of Lewis’ shoulder, just above the neckline of his borrowed t-shirt. ‘If you want,’ he whispers against Lewis’ neck.

‘No,’ Lewis whispers, ‘no, not tonight.’ 

Nico nods, then realises where he’s still doing that and draws back. ‘Okay,’ he says, and turns around, where a look at the clock proves that it is, indeed, not a civilised hour at all. ‘Alright.’

‘Yeah,’ Lewis echoes, and Nico thinks for a moment he might be reconsidering the offer, but that’s not it, because when he says, ‘I just want to sleep,’ he doesn’t sound tempted, not at all, but utterly exhausted and strangely apologetic, and it makes Nico suspect that he actually hasn’t slept at all tonight.

‘It’s okay,’ he repeats. He doesn’t know what else to say, because he knows Lewis well enough to know that even though he’s said he doesn’t want to be alone right now, he does want to be left alone, ‘I know.’ 

But the only thing he does know is that there’s nothing else for him to do than to as requested and to go back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written with the [31_days](http://31-days.livejournal.com/) prompt for today (August 10) in mind, but I just missed the official deadline of "today", which made it ineligible for that challenge. So now it's just a fic.


End file.
